Towards the Archetype of a Working-class Woman in the 1960s: Nell Dunn’s The Muse (2020) and her Early Writings

• Ángeles Jordán Soriano ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Almería
• Localización: Moving beyond the pandemic: English and American studies in Spain / coord. por Francisco Gallardo del Puerto, María del Carmen Camus Camus, Jesús Ángel González López, 2022, ISBN 978-84-19024-15-2, págs. 189-194
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto Completo Libro (pdf)
• Resumen

  • In 2020 the British author Nell Dunn published The Muse (2020), a biographical book devoted to a woman named Josie, whose life happens to have several parallelisms with those of the characters depicted in the author’s first writings. In Dunn’s words, Josie’s behavior, “her use of language” and “the freedom and daring of her life” are very present in the content of her literary output through these years (2020, i). Taking this into consideration, the aim of this paper is to explore the fictional and biographical connections among two of Nell Dunn’s first publications—Up the Junction (1963) and Poor Cow (1967)—and her most recent volume, The Muse (2020). The idea that there might be a number of fabrications in what was initially presented as a realistic portrayal of the society of its day will be subject to scrutiny.